Chavez's gasoline rationing plan causes uproar

FILE- In this Jan. 29, 2008 file photo, a Colombian vendor of smuggled gasoline from Venezuela, waits for clients on a a street corner in Cucuta, Colombia. As home to the world's cheapest gasoline, Venezuela has long had to contend with the hemorrhaging of supplies as smugglers haul gas across the border to cash in where the fuel costs far more. In neighboring Colombia, drivers pay 40 times as much as Venezuelans to tank up — $1.25 a liter ($4.73 a gallon), compared to 3 U.S. cents a liter (11 cents a gallon). (AP Photo/Fernando Llano, File)
— AP

FILE- In this Jan. 29, 2008 file photo, a Colombian vendor of smuggled gasoline from Venezuela, waits for clients on a a street corner in Cucuta, Colombia. As home to the world's cheapest gasoline, Venezuela has long had to contend with the hemorrhaging of supplies as smugglers haul gas across the border to cash in where the fuel costs far more. In neighboring Colombia, drivers pay 40 times as much as Venezuelans to tank up — $1.25 a liter ($4.73 a gallon), compared to 3 U.S. cents a liter (11 cents a gallon). (AP Photo/Fernando Llano, File)
/ AP

CARACAS, Venezuela 
As home to the world's cheapest gasoline, Venezuela has long had to contend with the hemorrhaging of supplies as smugglers haul gas across the border to cash in where the fuel costs far more.

In neighboring Colombia, drivers pay 40 times as much as Venezuelans to tank up - $1.25 a liter ($4.73 a gallon), compared to 3 U.S. cents a liter (11 cents a gallon).

So much gasoline is being taken out of Venezuela illegally that President Hugo Chavez's socialist government imposed rationing on motorists in one state bordering Colombia last year, and now it's touched off a furor in a second border state by announcing it will ration gasoline there, too.

"We transport workers are not to blame for this scourge," said Olivio Fernandez, a bus driver in Maracaibo, which is Venezuela's second-largest city with 2 million inhabitants. It's also the capital of Zulia state, where the expanded rationing is planned and where Chavez planned a Saturday visit for his re-election campaign.

Drivers will have microchip-embedded stickers affixed to their windshields to regulate purchases, just as motorists have been required to do in neighboring Tachira state for the past year.

Rationing in Tachira, home of the busiest Colombia-Venezuela border crossing, varies with a motor vehicle's size, location and use. Private automobiles in the border town of San Cristobal are limited to buying no more than 42 liters (11 gallons) a day, for example, while buses are limited to 150 liters (40) gallons.

Announced two weeks ago, Zulia's rationing was supposed to have gone into effect next month. But after heated criticism from local officials, the government decided to postpone the plan, saying it will start no later than August 2013 but suggesting it could be implemented before that.

Oil analysts say the new rationing may indicate something graver than a contraband problem, noting the anger-inducing plan was announced in an opposition-dominated state just three months before the presidential election. The measure could mean that production and refining troubles are worsening in the less-than-transparent state-run petroleum industry, the analysts say.

Venezuela is a major oil exporter but its refining capacity is limited, so the government buys gasoline from the United States, losing money by then selling it at home for almost nothing. Those imports have been steadily rising since 2009. In April, Venezuela imported 54,000 barrels a day of U.S.-refined gasoline, a 38 percent rise over the same month a year earlier, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The Chavez government has not explained why the gasoline imports from the United States, the principal market for Venezuelan crude, continue to climb and the press office of state-owned oil company PDVSA did not respond to repeated requests by The Associated Press for an explanation.

Ramon Espinasa, a Georgetown University economist, blames "operational problems" at some Venezuelan refineries as well as rising demand from power plants built in the past two years that burn gasoline and diesel fuel.